Meh, OS's don't die at EOL. There are thousands, if not millions, of machines running Win2k that simply can't be upgraded because they run industry systems.

And before anyone cries about security - if you're relying on the OS for your security you're ignoring everything else (the other layers) that are required... You're doing it wrong.

There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of Win2k machines that can't be upgraded because they drive industry systems. Hell, there's Win95 machines doing the same. Their security is ensured by incorporating layers of control... As should be done with any system, commensurate with it's risk and criticality.

I think they mean put the entire taskbar vertically on the left side of the screen, not left align the icons on the bottom of the taskbar.

Explorer Patcher just straight gives you the Windows 10 UI but it's had a lot of stability issues especially as new builds of Windows roll out.

There are some other alternatives like Open Shell which is free and can give more of an XP, Vista, or Win7 style start menu. Then there's paid options which are a little more polished like StartAllBack and Start11.

On the other hand if the only thing that bothers you is the context menu changes there are a couple of things you can do. You can edit a registry key to just get the old context menu. Or you can use Context Menu for Windows 11 to add your own context menu entries for applications where the developers won't include the "new" method to register their shell extensions. (It's been around since Windows 7 IIRC, but has no advantages over the old method until 11.)